“There is a widespread sense that workers are treated in a dehumanizing manner by the company. Co-workers express this in various ways, complaining that we are treated like “animals,” “slaves,” or “machines,” but the fundamental sentiment is the same: that the company does not treat us with dignity but instead sees as less than human, as objects which can be milked for profit and then discarded.”

Yassin Dabeh, a 19-year-old contract cleaner at Middlesex Terrace Long-Term Care Home, died of COVID-19 on Jan. 21. Yassin, who moved from Syria to London, Ont. with his family in 2016, was the youngest in the region to die of the virus. The outbreak at the 105-bed care home has already infected more than 150 […]

Since the pandemic broke out last March, we were told that we were all in the same boat. Now this is shown to be a great and terrible lie. While the workers have been losing their jobs and dying from COVID-19, Canadian capitalists have been hoarding astronomical sums of money. New analysis of StatsCan data […]

“In the same breath that they tell us that case counts in the plant are on a sharp incline they have the audacity to tell us that this workplace is still safe?”

In early January, Conservative Party of Canada leader Erin O’Toole responded to the news that some high-risk federal inmates would soon be getting vaccinated against COVID-19. He tweeted that “Not one criminal should be vaccinated ahead of any vulnerable Canadian or front line health worker”. With this statement, O’Toole was clearly giving a wink and […]

Pandemics are not historical accidents and the ones that began in 1918 and 2020 are no exceptions. The influenza virus of 1918 was not created by humans, but by an imperialist war, poor living conditions for the working class across the globe, and a lack of will to fight the pandemic, which greatly amplified both the spread and lethality of the virus. These three factors were all products of the system the pandemic occurred within, that of capitalism. And while capitalism did not create the virus, it can be said to have created the epidemic, both in 1918 and in 2020.

On Saturday Jan. 9, in an unprecedented move since the beginning of the pandemic, a curfew was imposed in Quebec. Quebec premier François Legault presented this measure as “shock treatment” to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, this curfew is just the most recent in the long line of measures aimed against individuals while leaving […]

Over the course of the pandemic, Manitoba has become the stage of one of the tensest political situations in Canada. Currently, Progressive Conservative (PC) Premier Brian Pallister has the lowest approval rating out of any provincial leader in the country. This is the first time since 2016 that approval for Pallister has dipped below approval […]

The horrors COVID-19 wreaked on long-term care homes during the first wave are well known. Now faced with the second wave, a completely predictable massacre in long-term care homes is brought on by the willful negligence of long-term care capitalists who have put profits before our very lives.  Even with the first wave, months before […]

A favourite phrase of governments during the pandemic has been, “We’re all in this together.” Given the gross mishandling of the pandemic by governments, that platitude will no longer resonate as it did before.